


come back to me

by Ryah_Ignis



Series: Season 12 Codas [19]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 12x19 Coda, M/M, boarding the train to angst-ville, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 01:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10776408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryah_Ignis/pseuds/Ryah_Ignis
Summary: "The worst part of all of this is that Dean remembers that look.  Remembers the calm, cool certainty in Cas’s eyes when they’d first met.  Dean remembers a chiseled piece of granite with ice chip eyes.  And he’s nothing like the Cas that Dean knows.  The Cas that Dean—"Cas gets kidnapped/brainwashed by a Nephilim.  Dean isn't too happy about it.





	come back to me

Dean wakes up aching.

And not just because Cas had healed his broken wrist but not the pain from being literally ground into the gravel.  The ache is in his chest, and it spreads through every cell, every atom.  If anyone else told him that, he’d shrug it off as melodramatic.  But right now?

“Dean?”

Beside him, Sam stirs.  After noticing that Dean hasn’t moved, never mind the fact that he’s just broken a bench with the force of his body, he scrambles to a half crouch to look over him.

“I’m fine.”

Gruffly, he pushes off the helping hand and gets to his feet, ignoring the pulsing headache growing behind his left eye.  He _hates_ getting mojo-ed.

“He’s gone,” Sam says, utterly needlessly.

There are little bits of gravel clinging to the indents in his palms.  Dean wipes them away on his jeans.

“I can’t believe he just—” Sam starts.

“I can.”

The worst part of all of this is that Dean remembers that look.  Remembers the calm, cool certainty in Cas’s eyes when they’d first met.  Dean remembers a chiseled piece of granite with ice chip eyes.  And he’s nothing like the Cas that Dean knows.  The Cas that Dean—

“We have to find him,” Sam says, thankfully breaking off that train of thought before Dean can finish it.

“He doesn’t want to be found.”

The words come out harsher than Dean had anticipated.  His hand flex at his sides a few times before clenching entirely.  Sam looks mildly alarmed, but Dean plows on anyway.

“He just hit the frigging reset button, Sam.  He powered up and he—he lost something along the way.”

Because that hadn’t been Cas looking back at him.  Not the Cas that texted long strings of emojis and called Hot Topic ‘the Hot Topical’ and ate every burger Dean ever made for him without complaint even though he could only taste molecules.  That right there was _Castiel_ , and Dean’s scared.

“Dean.  It’s going to be o—”

“Shut up.” Dean presses his palms over his eyelids. “Just shut up and get in the car.”

They ride back to the bunker in silence.  There’s nothing left to do now.  No doubt Cas has disabled the tracking on his phone.  Dean doesn’t say a word in the car and doesn’t say a word when he shuts himself in his room.

It doesn’t feel like the sanctuary it once did, knowing that the Men of Letters can get in whenever they want to, but it’s better than nothing.

There had been a time when he might have stormed and raged, cleared off his bedside table with a sweep of his hand and shattered anything within reach.  Instead, he sinks on to his memory foam mattress and buries his face in his hands.

Even in the semidarkness created by his palms, the headache grows worse.  Dean flops down on his back with a frustrated sigh.

“I hate you,” he mutters up at the ceiling.

There’s no force behind the words, no real meaning.  It doesn’t even make him feel better.  Because no matter how many times he says it or thinks it or shows it, he doesn’t hate Cas, not really.

He loves the photos Cas sends him sometimes of a funny sign that he saw on the road or an oddly shaped flower.  He loves the small smiles he has to fight to earn.  He loves how Cas makes coffee in the mornings, even though he doesn’t drink any, just because he knows Dean likes it.

He loves Cas.

The realization dawns like a smack in the face, but at the same time, it’s like he’s always known. 

To know for sure now is cruel irony.  The Cas who’d walked away with Kelly—that hadn’t been Cas, not really.

_Cas?_

He hasn’t bothered praying to Cas in what feels like a lifetime, but he has a sneaking suspicion that it will work now.

_If you can hear me, come back to me.  Please._

* * *

It’s been so long since he’s had a purpose.  A reason.  The Winchesters are a reason, but they’re not concrete.  They can be ungrateful.

Kelly is certainly not ungrateful.

She looks over at him, eyes shining, at every opportunity.  Cas tries to not let it get to him, but it’s hard to ignore the rightness of feeling needed.

Deep down, nestled somewhere beneath his revived Grace and the faith in that child, there’s the tiniest flicker of a feeling that he should be worried about this.

He didn’t even feel like this as an angel.  He’d never been this certain, he’d never known his place like this.  The only feeling that had ever come close had been with the Purgatory souls humming beneath the surface of his skin.

“I think he wants to say thank you,” Kelly tells him, pressing a hand to her stomach. “For protecting him.”

That should fill him with warmth, but it doesn’t.  It seems that this new certainty has removed all of his bad feelings, but all of the good ones, too.  For some reason, this doesn’t bother him, either.

Everything feels muted, but muted is so much better than the pain from before.

“He’s….welcome?”

He’s not sure what to say, but the scenes to satisfy Kelly.  She takes to looking dreamily out of the window, waiting to feel the next kick.

Cas doesn’t know where to go.  He’s sure the child will, eventually, so he just picks a direction Sam and Dean are unlikely to pick and goes.

The thing is, he knows that Dean can’t possibly know what these last two years have been like for him.  Dean has been needed all his life.  There’s a different kind of burden that comes with _always_ being needed, but through the veil of fuzziness that’s fallen over his brain, he can’t summon sympathy for that.  Not right now.

He’s just put his signal for another erratic turn when a prayer drifts through his head.  He’s so surprised by the fact that he can prayers again that he almost drives straight off the road and kills them both—and the child.

_I hate you._

It stings, even through the haze.  Cas suspects that before he discovered his new purpose, the pain would have been crippling.  As it is, he just feels a dull ache.

As if she can hear him, “It’s all going to be okay, Castiel. I’m sure of it.”

She smiles at him, and it eases the ache somewhat.

Someone needs him.  Someone.

Then, Dean’s voice manages to break through the haze, sharper than before.  No, not sharper.  Clearer.  Like making the static vanish on an old TV set.

_Cas?  If you can hear me, come back to me.  Please._

For a single lucid moment, everything else seems to fall away.  The last hour or so flashes through Cas’s head with frightening clarity:  feeling his Grace surround him like it hasn’t since he met the Winchesters, scorching Dagon away to nothing, knocking Sam and Dean out, leaving them-

The car comes to a screeching halt.  Beside him, Kelly gasps as she lurches forward in her seatbelt.

“Sam and Dean.  I left them unconscious in front of—”

He reaches blindly for the steering wheel, panic eroding the last of the Nephilim’s hold on him.  They’re in front of the gateway to Heaven.  They’re vulnerable.

“It’ll be okay,” Kelly says, with none of the warmth from the first iteration.

She clasps her hand on Cas’s wrist and the calm sweeps through him again.  Some part of him fights, but it’s almost instantly swamped.

He lifts his foot from the brakes.

His last thought before the eerie calm drags him under is _I’m sorry._

 


End file.
